To celebrate 40 years in business, the paperback publishing imprint Picador has reissued some of its most famous contemporary novels in elegant, illustrated covers.

Picador Senior Designer Neil Lang developed a design language that visually links 12 very different titles–including American Psycho, Bridget Jones’s Diary, All The Pretty Horses, White Noise, and The Line of Beauty–while leaving plenty of room for variation. The basic components: a black-and-white palette, customized typography, and bold illustrations that have the same sensibility of an old woodblock print. “Originally the series started with a more rigid feel, using the same typography and positioning on all,” Lang says on Picador’s blog, “but by using the black and white to unite them it meant that a typeface could be chosen to suit each title.”

It’s no easy feat to convey both the dystopian angst of White Noise and the unapologetic airiness of Bridget Jones in the same family of books, but Lang has done precisely that. (He has also created what has to be the scariest, therefore best, American Psycho cover ever. See slide No. 2.)

This is how you sell literature that most folks have already read. Make the books handsome on their own, then make them extra-handsome all together, so when customers go to buy just one, they feel obliged to snap up all 12.